Scottish Power Goes All In For Renewables

Scottish Power recently announced a new ￡10bn investment in green energy over the next five years. This comes just a month after the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, announced that he wants to see every British home powered by wind energy inside a decade.

The Scottish Power announcement is part of a larger plan by Scottish Power’s Spanish parent company Iberdrola to pour 75 billion euros (￡67.2 billion) into renewables around the world. This is a major shift in strategic focus and demonstrates that these large energy companies are now taking renewables seriously.

Government targets, such as the UK plan to have net-zero carbon emissions by the middle of this century, have often been greeted with a pinch of salt by critics, but the robust response across the energy and finance sectors shows that there is an appetite for change.

To see a developed and complex economy like the UK going entirely carbon neutral inside three decades will be a challenge, but there is clearly a direction of travel being indicated by the energy sector and Westminster. What would it really mean?

• More trees: around 25% of the UK land mass would need to be covered in trees so a reforestation strategy as described by David Attenborough in his recent Netflix special, A Life On Our Planet, would be essential.
• More rail, fewer planes: flights may eventually be able to use bio-fuel, but a change in habit is required - such as Europeans and Americans using trains for city to city journeys they might commonly fly between now.
• Electric cars: a change in how we get around and the fumes we create is essential. Cycling will be more common for short journeys and electric cars will replace the traditional petrol or diesel gas-guzzlers. The UK plans to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars from 2030.
• Smarter homes: better insulation and smarter devices, such as fridges that can automatically reduce power consumption when you are not at home for a few days. The growth in smart speaker devices is making this move to smart homes easier as they are natural control devices for everything else.
• Diet: meat production usually requires deforestation to create large grazing areas for animals such as cattle. People need to dramatically decrease their consumption of meat - they might not like it, but meat-free alternatives are getting better.

Some of these measures are already in progress. The announcement on car sales is particularly important because it means there is just a decade remaining to get a national system of charging points ready. We have also seen travel habits change because of the Covid-19 pandemic. I cannot imagine that business travel will return in the same form as it was in 2019 - tools such as Teams and Zoom have proven that you don’t really need to fly across Europe just to meet colleagues. People will still go for a client, but not an internal meeting.

These changes are long-term and require sustained support across different governments of all parties. Fortunately for the UK, all the major parties tend to agree on these climate change priorities so even if the Prime Minister has his critics, it’s not for his vision on what needs to be done about climate change.

A lot needs to be done, but the investment by companies like Scottish Power are going to underpin much of this change. We cannot build a future based on renewable energy if the energy companies are not planning to change and evolve into the twenty-first century.